New software-only appliance enables creation of storage pool from any
bare metal hardware on the Red Hat HCL

Gluster, the leading provider of scale-out,
open source storage solutions for public and private clouds, today
announced the availability of the Gluster Storage Software Appliance,
dramatically extending the range of commercially supported
configurations for Gluster in the private cloud and on-premise data
center environments. This new product combines a prepackaged operating
system with GlusterFS and can be deployed on any Red Hat Hardware
Compatibility List (HCL) certified host server and its certified storage.

In both public and private clouds, Gluster provides enterprises with the
ability to combine commodity compute and storage into a virtualized,
standardized, and centrally managed storage pool that can flexibly scale
to petabytes of capacity, GB/s of throughput, and N-way availability.
Prior to the release of the Storage Software Appliance, Gluster was
available for deployment in: public clouds, as an Amazon Machine Image
or RightScale Server Template; in private clouds, as a virtual storage
appliance on top of hypervisors such as VMware, KVM, or Xen; or as a
non-commercially supported implementation of the open source GlusterFS.

As of today, a fourth deployment option is available. Customers running
private clouds or on-premise data centers can now obtain commercial
support for Gluster deployed as a software appliance in a
non-virtualized, bare metal environment.

In on-premise, private cloud environments Gluster offers up to three
times the performance at one-third the cost of proprietary and
monolithic scale-up storage solutions. Like all Gluster solutions, the
Gluster Storage Software Appliance is POSIX-compliant and does not
require applications to be rewritten. Users of the Storage Software
Appliance can aggregate CPU, memory, and capacity into a single global
namespace, scale out capacity and performance linearly on-demand, and
benefit from drastically improved storage economics via the use of
commodity hardware.

“The increased use of cloud computing technologies in the private cloud
and on-premise data centers has established a need in terms of cloud
storage solutions specific to these environments,” said George Crump,
president and founder of Storage-Switzerland. “The Gluster Storage
Software Appliance is an excellent example of a solution designed for
cloud environments that require high availability, performance and
value. The choice to do all of this on Red Hat certified hardware makes
the value and usability of the solution even more compelling.”

The Gluster Storage Software Appliance incorporates the latest version
of GlusterFS (version 3.2), which includes:

Geo-Replication – providingcontinuous, asynchronous and
incremental replication service from one site to another over local
area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs) and across the
Internet. Only incremental changes are replicated while operating at
the block level with no requirement for snapshot-like copies of whole
files or volumes. In addition, v3.2 features intelligent asynchronous
replication in which GlusterFS tracks changes to the primary data and
replicates in real time across a WAN. Changes are tracked and queued
to ensure data stays synchronized regardless of latency or potential
network interruptions.

Easily accessible usage quotas – with the ability to set quota
on usage of disk space by directories or volumes. Storage
administrators can control disk space utilization at the directory
and/or volume levels with Gluster by setting limits to allocate disk
space at any level in the volume and directory hierarchy. This is
particularly useful in cloud deployments to facilitate the utility
billing model.

Monitoring and management tools(Gluster Top and Profile)
– that provide familiar monitoring and statistics capabilities for I/O
operations and performance statistics. Gluster Top presents the top
100 operations per server, providing visibility into the I/O workload
pattern. Gluster Profile provides performance statistics over a
user-defined time period for metrics including latency, number and
type of calls, and amount of data read or written.

“The industry is becoming increasingly savvy to the fact that storage
technology can make or break a public or private cloud deployment,” said
Ben Golub, president and CEO at Gluster. “Our new Storage Software
Appliance delivers highly available, scale-out, on-demand storage
technology that can integrate seamlessly with Red Hat technology in any
private cloud or on-premise storage environment.”

Pricing & Availability

The Gluster Storage Software Appliance will be generally available on
May 16, and it can run on any hardware on the Red Hat Hardware
Compatibility List. For sales inquiries contact sales@gluster.com
or for more information visit www.gluster.com.

Gluster provides open source storage solutions for public and private
clouds. Gluster solutions enable customers to scale performance,
capacity and availability on-demand at a fraction of the cost of
proprietary and monolithic storage solution. Over 140 customers have
scaled Gluster in building-block fashion--from a few terabytes to
multiple petabytes--to meet the most demanding capacity and performance
needs. Gluster uses a unified global namespace to virtualize disk and
memory resources into a single shared pool that is centrally managed.
Our scalable virtual appliances address the needs of public and private
clouds, traditional data centers, and shared storage for virtual server
environments. Our open source community has downloaded and deployed
hundreds of thousands of copies of GlusterFS. Used by enterprises in a
wide range of industries, including digital media delivery, healthcare,
Internet, energy and biotech, Gluster is privately-held and
headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Visit us at www.gluster.com.